Painting Again!

I know today ought to be a webcomic, but as I said before, I’ve been funneling most of my creative energy into that… and I needed to use some of that this week.

It’s Platypus Con this weekend, and that means we’re doing a Warmachine/Hordes tournament! I work best with deadlines, which means that I do the majority of my painting with an event like this coming up. Where I’ll be publicly playing the game, where people can be walking by to see. And because they do look better on the table painted…

The first challenge for me was just figuring out what I wanted to be playing in the tournament, what I wanted to bring along. I don’t have the time to paint particularly much, and I wanted for the painting I did do to be for models that were going to be at the Con. We only just decided last week officially what point level of armies we were playing, so I had to actually scale down because we’re going smaller skirmishes (so we can definitely get a full tournament in!). I’ve hopefully optimized a couple of armies, or at least, I committed to them and boxed them up so it feels final in my mind!

With primed models – something I was also furiously working on last week – my next step is to drybrush some white on, to draw out some of the details on the model and to begin the work of doing some highlighting on the model. Or at least that’s the theory. There’s definitely some detail that pops with this method, so by having (almost) all the models at least to this stage… that’ll help.

And at lower points, the decision was pistoleros. The Trollkin Highwaymen! Pew pew!

Because the one model I had previously painted was one of the basic Trolls from the starter box (picture below), I decided that the next ones to get some paint ought to be his companion light Trolls, and from there, I hope to get some paint going on the Warlock from the starter box, so that I would have a totally painted Trolls starter box/demo army. Maybe I’ll join Chad in doing some demo games!

Some of what takes a lot of work in the early parts of working on an army is figuring out what you’re looking at, and what you’re going to do with it. Is an area skin? Leather? Metal? Some other material (I considered going for more of a stone look to the axe, for instance). These two models share legs and torso, so those decisions will carry over from one to the other. However, with their different weapons and poses, you get some very different angles on the details. And I’m not sure what I want to do with the back there, with a region that – with the Scottish inspiration of the Trollbloods army – could be a kilt pattern, or at least a brightly colored accent.

Anyway, I got some initial work done on those two, which gives me a decent run towards completion on the starter set!

Here’s that first guy again… from not quite a year ago. I’ve added more to him as well, even while looking back at him to see how I was approaching things. I found that he actually seems to have different legs and torso from the other two, so it wasn’t quite as helpful to look at him – although it still helps with looking at materials, and deciding what they are.

The other thing I like on this model is the marking I’ve done on the base, for marking what the front of the model is (for sight lines). I might do that on all the models I’m bringing, since that’s a useful and important game element, and because it’ll add some color to what might otherwise be a kind of dull looking primed collection…

I’ll hopefully have more to share in the coming days, but for now, thanks for taking a look!

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